Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6608812" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure if you're comparing &quot;wizard school&quot; to a modern university, a nineteenth century one, or a mediaeval one.But whatever the comparison, I simply don't understand your argument about language learning. Of course most multi-lingual people in the world learned their languages as children. But that doesn't mean that the world isn't full of people who learned languages as scholars; to the contrary, it is. I went to university with people who learned Latin and Ancient Greek as university students, and I teach students who are learning languages as part of their studies.In other words, the last quoted paragraph is just wrong, in moving from &quot;tend to be learned&quot; to &quot;all the languages would already have been picked up&quot;. Given that that claim is just obviously wrong for the real world, why would it be true in the fantasy world?A wizard player who wants to justify knowing some elemental language to his/her GM just indicates that s/he learned it at wizard school (when the others were studying Gnoll or Draconic, or playing quidditch, or whatever).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6608812, member: 42582"] I'm not sure if you're comparing "wizard school" to a modern university, a nineteenth century one, or a mediaeval one. But whatever the comparison, I simply don't understand your argument about language learning. Of course most multi-lingual people in the world learned their languages as children. But that doesn't mean that the world isn't full of people who learned languages as scholars; to the contrary, it is. I went to university with people who learned Latin and Ancient Greek as university students, and I teach students who are learning languages as part of their studies. In other words, the last quoted paragraph is just wrong, in moving from "tend to be learned" to "all the languages would already have been picked up". Given that that claim is just obviously wrong for the real world, why would it be true in the fantasy world? A wizard player who wants to justify knowing some elemental language to his/her GM just indicates that s/he learned it at wizard school (when the others were studying Gnoll or Draconic, or playing quidditch, or whatever). [/QUOTE]

Verification